Several EU Member States have introduced innovations in the provision of social services in recent years, motivated by a number of reasons, not least in order to provide a wider range of choice to recipients, to help ensure quality and to contain costs, while at the same time maintaining equality of access to the services concerned. Accordingly, they have experimented with giving final consumers more say over the services they receive and the form in which they are delivered, in particular, through `personal budget' schemes under which users of services can choose how to spend the money allocated to them, or through voucher schemes, which are similar in kind. Both have the effect of introducing market mechanisms into the provision of social services, of linking supply more closely with demand and of introducing competition between providers, so giving them an incentive to maintain quality and to keep costs down.

Host Country : Denmark

Place and date : Copenhagen, 1.4.2009

Peer countries : Estonia - Hungary - Italy - Lithuania - Netherlands - Portugal - Romania - Spain - United Kingdom

Stakeholders : ESN, Eurocities

Although the nature and detail of such schemes varies between countries, they have sufficient features in common that Member States can learn from the experience of their implementation in different places and from the extent to which they have achieved their various objectives without incurring excessive administrative costs or raising problems related to equity and service accessibility or to service supply. In the Peer Review, Denmark, the hosting country, will present details of the scheme which it has implemented and the effects that it has had, with particular focus on choice, quality and equity issues.

Peer Review manager

Ms Monika Natter (ÖSB Consulting GmbH)